Hail Hillary

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She's out of her husband's shadow, and more and more
Americans think she might be president herself one day, writes
Michael Gawenda.

Several weeks ago, during a lightning trip to Iraq by a group of
US senators, Hillary Clinton, the junior senator from New York and
the former first lady who was the subject of more abuse, rumour and
innuendo than any first lady in American history, gave a rare
interview on one of the Sunday morning television talk shows.

She was sitting in the garden of the US compound in Baghdad, and
beside her sat senior Republican senator and potential presidential
candidate in 2008 John McCain.

Clinton has none of her husband's charm. There is no evidence to
suggest that she has developed the famously seductive handshake
brilliantly described in Joe Klein's book Primary Colours,
the handshake that could signal Bill Clinton was very pleased to
meet you, and sometimes that he was very very pleased indeed.

She may not be Bill Clinton, but Hillary Clinton has over the
past decade nevertheless remade herself.

She has gone from a bookish woman in thick glasses, awkward,
intense and seemingly humourless, living her political ambitions
vicariously through pushing and shoving her philandering husband
into the White House, into a political rising star.

She is always immaculately groomed. Since her makeover, overseen
by Vogue editor Anna Wintour in Bill Clinton's second
term, she looks . . . well, to a majority of registered Democrats
at least, like their candidate for the 2008 presidential
election.

So here she is, sitting in the garden of the US compound in
Baghdad, speaking earnestly about the challenge facing the US in
Iraq, careful to acknowledge the bravery of American soldiers,
eager to show that she is no vacillator like John Kerry, a
supporter of the war in Iraq, and opposed to any talk of a
timetable for the withdrawal of US forces from the country.

She has managed to put behind her the politically frustrated, ambitious wife of a promiscuous president.

Suddenly from Washington, the interviewer asks John McCain
whether he thinks Hillary Clinton would make a good president.

Clinton laughs, the sort of laugh that speaks of embarrassment
and pleasure and then plays at not having heard the question. But
McCain heard it all right. He pays no attention to Clinton's
over-wrought laughter.

"I think Hillary Clinton would make a very good president of the
United States," he says.

For the next 24 hours, McCain's endorsement of Clinton leads the
television news and is given front-page treatment in all the major
newspapers. In a bitterly divided America, the fact that a senior
Republican and potential rival, could, without hesitation, say that
Clinton has what it takes to be president was remarkable.

It is hard to overstate the American media's fascination with
Clinton. Recently, she was on the cover of New York
magazine with this headline: 'The Once and Future President
Clinton' - no question mark.

And in a gushing article that seemed to go on forever, the
reporter reluctantly confirmed that the New York senator had
refused to be interviewed for the piece.

Clinton refuses all requests for interviews unless they are on
specific policy issues. She does not answer questions about her
presidential ambitions, though she is always careful not to rule
out a run in 2008. She repeats this mantra; "My focus is on issues
and on my re-election as a senator from New York in 2006.
Period".

Bill Clinton, whose open-heart surgery last September, tsunami
appeal work and recent surgery to remove scar tissue and fluid on
his lung have been followed by Americans more closely than the
Pope's illnesses, was less reticent about his wife's future.

"Hillary would make an excellent president, probably a better
president than I was," he said shortly before he went into hospital
in New York two weeks ago.

Hillary Clinton was not at his side, nor was she there when he
came out of hospital. She refused media requests for a photo
opportunity with her husband by his bedside. All she was prepared
to do, before the surgery, was issue a statement saying she and
daughter Chelsea were praying for his speedy recovery.

There is, of course, persistent gossip about the Clinton
marriage, that it is a sham, that they no longer live together,
that Bill Clinton is, well, still being Bill Clinton, but the
rumours never make the mainstream media.

Hillary Clinton has succeeded in well and truly emerging from
her husband's large shadow.

She has managed the tricky task of putting behind her the
politically frustrated, ambitious wife of a sexually promiscuous
president, in a sense more humiliated than Bill Clinton by the way
his affair with Monica Lewinsky was played out in public, tawdry
detail by tawdry detail, while quietly defending his legacy and
exploiting his hero status among many Democrats.

In a party that has lost two presidential elections in a row and
that now is in the minority in both houses of Congress, Bill
Clinton looms large.

"He addressed the weakness in the party," says Bruce Reed,
president of the Democratic Leadership Council. "We have lost five
of the last seven presidential races. Bill Clinton stands out as
our only winner."

Reed is convinced that Hillary Clinton, with her husband's
formidable political skills at her disposal, has a lot going for
her.

"Hillary is more of a cultural and social conservative than many
Republicans want to paint her," he says. "She has a real chance of
being our candidate. She's one of the smartest and most talented
politicians around. She has enormous appeal across the party."

Senator Clinton certainly works hard. One minute, she is
grilling Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about claims that US
soldiers are operating with poor equipment in Iraq; the next, she
is taking on Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan over his support for
the Bush tax cuts, which have led to a ballooning of the budget
deficit.

She travels overseas; to Iraq, to India, to Japan, all in recent
weeks, and wherever she goes, she makes news. After she gave the
keynote speech at a conference in New Delhi on India's future,
The Times of India said: "She came, She saw, She
conquered".

She talks about the role of prayer in her life - very important;
she is pro-choice, but is anguished about an unacceptably high
abortion rate; she is campaigning for better treatment of soldiers
after their return from duty in Iraq.

As a result, she has an approval rating of 69 per cent, with
close to a majority of Republicans saying she is doing a good job.
Most observers agree that she will easily be re-elected in 2006.
Indeed, the Republicans are finding it hard to come up with a
candidate to stand against her.

And in a series of national polls, 40 per cent of Americans say
she should be the Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008.
John Kerry comes a distant second with 21 per cent support.

After her run-in with Greenspan, James Carville, a veteran
Democrat adviser, said Hillary Clinton was "the most brilliant and
gutsy politician in America by a long shot".

Even Senator Joe Biden, who has made it clear that he intends to
be a candidate for the Democratic nomination, says Clinton will
take the nomination if she wants it.

"She is the elephant in the living room", he told New
York magazine.

Hillary Clinton, even her fiercest opponents agree, is
extraordinarily intelligent, has boundless energy, and in
the four-and-a-half years since she was elected to the Senate,
has managed to win over the substantial numbers of Americans who
once deeply disliked her.

Former presidential adviser David Gergin says if a presidential
election were held now and Hillary Clinton were the Democratic
candidate, she would lose by a substantial margin. He says he could
not think of a single state that voted for Bush last November that,
right now, would switch if Hillary were the candidate.

"But a big victory in 2006 in New York would give her momentum
and the time to build support," he says. "She always had the
intelligence and the determination to succeed.

"She was sometimes a little tone deaf on politics, but I think
that has changed. She has shown she can build bridges across the
political divide and do it smoothly and easily".

Most analysts seem to agree that Americans may be ready to
embrace a woman as president - certainly, most polls show that a
woman candidate would not be disadvantaged, and some polls show
that Clinton would bring out women who had never before voted.

Still, it would be a remarkable, unique achievement in American
politics - in any liberal democracy - for Hillary Clinton to
complete the journey from widely despised spouse of a philandering,
if extremely politically skilled, president to becoming the first
female president of the most powerful nation on earth.

Most observers agree that the odds are against this, but it
seems entirely possible that she will beat the odds, as she has in
the past, and get a shot at winning the office that she probably
always believed should be hers.